Kids are Bathed in Bits

Dan Schawbel has a great interview with Don Tapscott. I've excerpted a few pieces, but the the whole interview is worth reading. And this video of Tapscott - absolutely brilliant. Show it to your kids, your students, their parents, colleagues, administrators - anyone you can get to watch it.

Exclusive Interview With International Celebrity Businessman Don Tapscott « Personal Branding Blog - Dan Schawbel

Today, I spoke with Mr. Don Tapscott, who is best known as the author of Wikinomics, the international bestselling web 2.0 book. His new book is called Grown up Digital, and I caught up with Don to further investigate how my generation is changing the world as we know it.

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Don, what does it mean to “grow up digital”?

“To be surrounded by digital media from birth.”

These kids are bathed in bits. To them, technology is like the air. Born between 1977 and 1997, these teenagers and young adults have grown up surrounded by digital devices and media. I call them the Net Generation. Around the world this generation is flooding into the workplace, marketplace, and every niche of society. These youth are bringing their demographic muscle, media smarts, purchasing power, new models of collaborating and parenting, entrepreneurship, and political power into the world.

What are the benefits and drawbacks to being raised on technology for both the millennials and other generations?

“Kids benefit from being raised in a technologically rich environment.”

A school that knows how to exploit the new technology gives its students a better education. Smart employers use the technology to make the workplace and more varied and stimulating environment. However, baby boomers who didn’t grow up with this technology can find the higher metabolism of instant messaging, wikis, blogs, and similar tools to be extremely stressful.
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What are your top 3 guidelines for educators to tap the Net Gen potential?

• Don’t throw technology into the classroom and hope for good things. Focus on the change in pedagogy, not the technology. Learning 2.0 is about dramatically changing the relationship between a teacher and students in the learning process. Get that right and use technology for a student-focused, customized collaborative learning environment.
• Cut back on lecturing. You don’t have all the answers. Besides, broadcast learning doesn’t work for this generation. Start asking students questions and listen to their answers. Listen to the questions students ask, too. Let them discover the answer. Let them cocreate a learning experience with you.
• Empower students to collaborate. Encourage them to work with each other and show them how to access the world of subject-matter experts available on the Web.